After a weekend of many Premier League debuts, Antonio Conte's first match in English football was reserved for Monday night, as Chelsea hosted West Ham who started with Dimitri Payet on the bench.
Chelsea's wing-focused attacks
With the ball, Conte's side showed the same focus on attacking through the wide spaces which had been one of the biggest changes seen in the pre-season matches. When ...

You really think football these days sport players like Vieira, Keane, Fabregas (of early days)??

A.F:

Yes. No point in even asking for examples, because you see them everywhere.

Trion:

I am not assuming, It's evident in every team.Busquets, Coquelin, Schneiderlin, Kante etc.

Again, no idea what you're on about. You've always had these players. Much like how any kind of formation, whether it's one with a 2-man midfield or 3, does have a distribution of roles.

Anyway, the death of this and that etc etc. is boring to read about and the "observations" are pretty much always wrong. It's usually the kind of stuff that's written by bad writers, like Jonathan Wilson.

You should always consider what if our current head coach gets hit by a bus, who is going to take over from him

----------I think what liverpool do really quite well is they cut their losses, Benteke is a good player but didn’t work out for liverpool, they sold him because they knew he wasn’t going to work out. They didn’t try for years & years trying to make it work out.

There was a segment on Match of the Day when the commentator was extolling the virtues of Francis Coquelin before he was cut off. In it he was saying, as Coquelin drove through the midfield, that “he has had a good game actually, not just in a defensive sense but…”

By using carries, we can get a better understanding of the relationship between assisters and shooters, and understand how strikers prefer to take their shots. To demonstrate I’m going to use Olivier Giroud and Diego Costa as examples.

Giroud and Costa take their shots from very similar locations (roughly 12 metres from goal). However, Costa has an average carry distance of 3.4 metres per shot, indicating that he tends to travel on the ball beforehand, perhaps adjusting himself to gain a better position. Giroud on the other hand adds only 0.8 metres of carry distance per shot.

Having an understanding of how players take their shots – such as whether they follow a dribble or not – has ramifications when it comes to both opposition analysis and recruitment. For example when coming up against Diego Costa, it’s more likely that he moves towards goal himself – so the defence should be set to prevent him from these movements.

Additionally, within Arsenal’s system it’s evident that Giroud is reliant on his team-mates to give the ball straight to him in a position where can fire off a shot early.

Arsenal often out-shoot opponents who sit back and do not give up much space in the defensive third. The number of bodies and lack of space lends itself to needing a striker who can generate shots from tight spaces, or gets shots off soon after receiving a pass, such as Giroud. Interestingly though, new signing Lucas Perez has an average carry distance of 5 metres per shot – a major stylistic difference from Olivier Giroud as he is a player who is capable of attacking at speed and on the move. Perez will likely enable Arsenal to attack more on the counter or at greater speed this season, offering a new dimension to their play.